Early Twentieth-Century Continental Philosophy

Preface: The Four Conceptual Features

vii Preface The Four Conceptual Features The book you are about to read concerns early twentieth-century continental philosophy, that is, French and German philosophy from 1903, the original publication date of Bergson’s “Introduction to Metaphysics,” to 1966, the original publication date of Foucault’s “The Thought of the Outside.” This book aims to be a general introduction to “continental philosophy .” It should enable one to study, with insight, not only the figures covered here (Bergson, Freud, Husserl, early Heidegger, later Heidegger, later Merleau-Ponty, and early Foucault), but also most of the central texts written after the 1950s by Derrida, Deleuze, Deleuze and Guattari, Foucault, Lacan, Levinas, Lyotard, Gadamer, and the so-called “French feminists” such as Irigaray and Kristeva. Although one strain of European thought has usually defined “continental philosophy,” that is, phenomenology (both its German and French versions)—and we shall spend a significant amount of time discussing phenomenology—we shall consider three other strains: Bergsonism, psychoanalysis, and then finally what is commonly called “structuralism” (although we shall not use the word “structuralism” below). In a survey of early twentieth-century continental philosophy, more could be said here; we could have included a discussion of “the Frankfurt school” (Adorno, for example), Levinas, or Sartre. These exclusions indicate that there is an idiosyncratic reason for the selection of the figures examined here. It seems to me that the specific figures selected set up what I have called “the great French philosophy of the Sixties.”1 1. Leonard Lawlor, Thinking through French Philosophy: The Being of the Question (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003). viii · Preface Therefore the book is laid out in a series of readings of specific texts (arranged chronologically by the original publication date of the texts). Each chapter provides first what I am calling a “Summary-Commentary,” that is, a relatively traditional and linear exposition of the text under consideration . But then second, each chapter provides an “Interpretation.” While influenced by the readings Derrida, Deleuze, and Foucault (and others) have provided of these figures, each “Interpretation” pushes to the side their well-known criticisms: Derrida’s criticism of Husserl and Heidegger, Deleuze’s criticism of phenomenology, Deleuze and Guattari’s criticism of Freud, Foucault’s distancing himself from Bergson, Freud, and Merleau-Ponty. Each “Interpretation” aims to take up a creative relation to the text being considered and thereby produce a positive history of this period. More precisely, by suppressing some ideas and exaggerating others , each chapter’s “Interpretation” attempts to assemble and systematize the four conceptual features that animate “the great French philosophy of the Sixties.” The four features are: (1) the starting point in immanence (where immanence is understood first as internal, subjective experience, but then, due to the universality of the epoché, immanence is understood as ungrounded experience); (2) difference (where difference gives way to multiplicity, itself emancipated from an absolute origin and an absolute purpose; being so emancipated, multiplicity itself becomes the absolute); (3) thought (where thought is understood as language liberated from the constraints of logic, and language is understood solely in terms of its own being, as indefinite continuous variation); and (4) the overcoming of metaphysics (where metaphysics is understood as a mode of thinking based in presence, and overcoming is understood as the passage to a new mode of thought, a new people, and a new land). Through the phrase “the overcoming of metaphysics,” the fourth feature in particular indicates the central role that Heidegger plays in this book. It is Heidegger who shows, in 1929, that we can understand thought only when we suspend its object, when it is the thought of the nothing. It is Heidegger, in 1950, who shows that “language is language”; he shows that, grounded in nothing but itself, language opens out over an abyss, a void, an outside. It is Heidegger who inspires Foucault’s title “The Thought of the Outside.” Therefore, this book aims at demonstrating a movement from Bergson, through Freud, Husserl , Heidegger, and Merleau-Ponty, toward what Foucault, Derrida, and Deleuze have called “the outside.” For “the great French philosophers of the Sixties,” Derrida, Deleuze, and Foucault, the outside is conceived in Preface · ix two ways, which overlap and intersect. On the one hand, the outside is the external as opposed to the internal; for example, the unconscious as opposed to consciousness. On the other, the outside is the difference between oppositions such as the conscious and...